of blind arcades. The best craftsman,
Daedalus, devised devious walls
that would upset anyone’s orientation:
their winding compelled wandering eyes
to pirouette on impatient paths—
like Phrygian Maeander, who flows for fun,
backward and forward, confusing his waves,
now to his source, now to the sea,
keeping his precarious current busy—
so the craftsman crammed uncountable paths
with circumlocution; the arcades were so tricky
it was difficult for Daedalus himself
to retrieve their only entrance and exit.
There they trapped the boy-bull, the two-fold figure,
and Athenian flesh fed it the ninth
and the eighteenth year, but a youth drafted
in the twenty-seventh, took him down.